Why the Internet of the near future will be radically different

Some ISPs played safe, blocking access to file sharing websites altogether for a brief period, notwithstanding the fact that blocking a website is something that can be done only by the government. "In a sense this is a return to the pre-2003 days when VSNL and MTNL would just block a website without any proper process," says Pranesh Prakash, of the Centre for Internet and Society a Bangalore-based internet advocacy group. The court order did not mandate the blocking of any websites.

The Myspace case is on appeal, but here's another example, this time from Australia. Twitter has been sued by a man who was wrongfully accused by a celebrity, via a tweet, of stalking her. The two people reached a legal settlement, but Twitter itself has been sued for what one of its users tweeted. And following the principle that in the offline world, a newspaper's publisher can be sued for what one of its columnists writes, the lawyer for the complainant told a tech website: "Twitter is a publisher like any other."

GoI's New Rules

The attempt to bridge the difference between offline and online worlds took a dramatic, if relatively less noticed, turn last year, when the government here introduced new rules.

The rules mandated intermediaries had to sign new agreements with users that prohibited the latter from publishing anything online that (among others things) was 'grossly harmful', 'harassing', 'disparaging', or 'hateful'. With these new rules, curbs on what is allowed to be said online are now actually more restrictive than curbs offline.

As a brief on the new rules by PRS Legislative Research, a non-profit research initiative, points out the rules prohibit certain content on the internet which may be permissible in other mediums. Consider the example of a book which may publish a controversial essay. Under the new rules, the same essay may not be reproduced on the internet. That could be one of the fallouts of the new government rules.

There is another fallout. "The impact of the IT rules is that they effectively make the intermediary a censor of content," says intellectual property lawyer Shwetasree Majumder.

To test the rules, the Centre for Internet and Society conducted a 'sting' operation last year. It sent 'takedown' notices to seven major websites, asking them to remove content from their sites and quoting liberally from the rules. The notices were largely nonsensical, but despite this, six of the seven websites immediately complied.

Interestingly, the recent court cases filed against large intermediaries like Google, Facebook and Yahoo weren't preceded by issuing takedown notices. Even more interestingly, the counsel for the complainant in one of the two cases reportedly cited the Myspace case as a precedent to argue that intermediaries could be held liable, even if it was users who put up objectionable content.

Content by Country

"We have not been subject to local laws thus far," said the representative of one of the foreign internet intermediaries to ET on Sunday. "We have a global policy on what content our users can put up." The commercial and business strategies, and the huge databases maintained by the intermediaries, will increasingly make such a position difficult to sustain.

Indeed, as these companies grow in size, profitability and increase their share of user time spent online, they will increasingly be under pressure from regulators and Big Content. Claims of being a neutral intermediary may not wash.

Already the government has demanded readier access to Gmail and other online accounts as part of criminal investigations. In the first six months of 2011, Google received requests from the Indian government to hand over data on a total of 2,439 user accounts. That's the highest number of user data requests made by any country, except the United States (11,057).

There are other examples. A few weeks ago Twitter announced it will filter out tweets according to country, thus a tweet visible to American users may not be visible to Indian users if Twitter has been told to take it down by a court or if, as is more likely to be the case, Twitter is responding to someone outraged by what the tweet said.

Visited a blog on blogspot.com (owned by Google) recently? If you're in India, it redirects you to blogspot.in. Many have interpreted this as Google's move to do the same, create country-specific websites for the same content so that filtering and removal of objectionable content by country is made easier.

Where will this lead to? Several separate 'national internets' with differing and more regulated-than-before content, and where regulations differ across countries, is very much a possibility.